So instead of spending years fighting her case in failing health, she pled guilty to end the ordeal. Just last year, the state of Georgia executed Ray Cromartie for a murder. The case against him was paper thin and Cromartie maintained his innocence until the end, but Georgia denied every request for DNA testing that could have set the record straight. A lesser-known fact about the case is that 20 years ago, Georgia prosecutors offered Cromartie a plea deal under which he could have been paroled after seven years and free by now.
But Cromartie refused to admit guilt, and so the state retaliated by seeking the death penalty and ultimately killing him. Succumb to coercive tactics like evidence suppression and pretrial detention like George and Lavette, and begrudgingly accept a conviction with lifetime consequences.
Or assert your constitutional rights, like Ray, and face certain retribution. This impossible choice we call plea bargaining takes place tens of thousands of times every day in America. Criminal case dockets have become so bloated in the last fifty years as Americans have disastrously over-relied on the criminal legal system to solve all our problems. Pressure-packed, conveyor-belt plea bargaining has become the only release valve. Plea bargaining would be an acceptable way to resolve criminal cases if it were a fair fight between prosecution and defense.
Since roughly the s and the accompanying War on Drugs, prosecutors have been handed — and in many cases lobbied for — increasingly punitive tools to pressure defendants to take bad deals. Stuntz in the Atlantic. Instead of waiting for their cases to go to trial, most people choose to plead guilty, Yoffe reports.
On average, 94 percent of state-level felony convictions are the result of plea bargains, as well as around 97 percent of federal convictions.
So prosecutors and defense attorneys attempt to negotiate charges and sentences acceptable to both sides — though prosecutors often have much more bargaining power than defense attorneys. Even though prosecutors largely base their charging and bargaining decisions on the assessed strength of available evidence, such assessments are not perfect. While guilty people are more receptive to plea offers, innocent defendants are not immune to the potentially coercive factors that make pleading guilty attractive such as pretrial detention and differences in duration of sentences.
Prosecutors often offer plea deals with dramatically lower sentences than those likely to be imposed if a jury finds the defendant guilty. In some cases, defendants who opted for a trial instead of pleading guilty have received tenfold sentence increases from the original plea offer , or even life sentences , upon conviction. Even innocent defendants may feel it would be too risky to go to trial.
Studies have confirmed that the larger the sentence gap between the plea offer and the likely trial sentence, the higher the likelihood for defendants — both guilty and innocent — to plead guilty. When defendants are held in jail before trial, they may be more likely to accept a plea deal as well — even if they are innocent. The promise of immediate release, usually through probation or a sentence for time already served behind bars, has been found to increase both true and false guilty plea rates.
With tools like these, the justice system was already skilled at encouraging defendants to plead guilty — even if they were innocent. Funk, who was elected in , has stopped routinely jailing defendants arrested for driving with a suspended license. It gives them ownership in society.
And once their names are on the docket, the system strongly encourages them to plead guilty. Law books, lawyers, and prosecutors were rare.
Most judges had little or no legal training, and victims ran their own cases with the self-evident exception of homicides. Trials were brief, and people generally knew one another. By the 19th century, however, our modern criminal-justice system was coming into its own: Professional prosecutors emerged, more defendants hired lawyers to represent them, and the courts developed more-formal rules for evidence.
Trials went from taking minutes or hours to lasting days. Calendars became clogged, which gave judges an incentive to start accepting pleas. The advantages of plea bargains became even clearer in the latter part of the 20th century, after the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, issued a series of decisions, between and , that established robust protections for criminal defendants.
These included the landmark Gideon v. Wainwright and Miranda v. Arizona decisions, the former of which guaranteed the Sixth Amendment right to counsel in felony cases since expanded to some misdemeanor cases , and the latter of which required that police inform those in their custody of the right to counsel and against self-incrimination. Before the s, according to William J. Stuntz, between one-fourth and one-third of state felony charges led to a trial. Today the figure is one-twentieth. The legal system provides few rules and protections for those who take a deal.
This seemed eminently fair. But crime had already started to increase sharply. The rise provoked a get-tough response from police, prosecutors, and legislators. By the s, the U. California reformed its three-strikes legislation in to impose such punishments only for serious or violent felonies. The growth of the system took on a life of its own.
Legislators have added so many acts to criminal codes that in , Neil Gorsuch—now on the Supreme Court, but then an appellate judge—publicly raised concerns. Geer has since left for a private criminal-defense firm.
Before us was a two-inch stack of paperwork that included police reports on everyone who had been picked up the night before, for a variety of misdemeanor violations. Police officers have wide discretion in deciding whether a person is breaking the law, and they sometimes arrest people for such offenses as sleeping in public and sitting too long on a bench.
Many clients tell Eyster as soon as they meet her that they want to plead guilty and get time served. The choice makes sense under the circumstances. Those with a conviction in the United States can be denied public housing, professional licenses, and student loans. People with a misdemeanor conviction who get picked up for another minor offense are more likely to face subsequent conviction—and that, according to Issa Kohler-Hausmann, an associate professor of law and sociology at Yale, is part of a deliberate strategy.
This year, New York City settled a federal class-action lawsuit against it for issuing hundreds of thousands of unjustified criminal summonses.
Trials leave copious records, but many plea bargains leave little written trace. Instead, they are sometimes worked out in hurried hallway conversations—or, as I witnessed, in brief courtroom conferences.
For many of the cases, Todoran was making her decision in less than a minute. I felt I was watching justice dispensed at the pace of speed dating. Critics on the left and the right are coming to agree that our criminal-justice system, now so reliant on plea bargaining, is broken. Among them is Jed S. The Framers adopted trials for a reason, he has argued, and replacing them with plea bargains—for convenience, no less—is unconstitutional.
He wants pleas to clearly explain several things: exactly what defendants are pleading to, what obligations classes, probation defendants are incurring, what the consequences of their failing to follow through would be, and what potential effects a guilty plea could have on their lives. Stuntz suggested giving those who plead guilty the same protections that are offered in the military system of justice.
Before accepting a plea, military judges conduct inquiries to ensure that pleas were not made under duress, and that the facts support them. No amount of tinkering, however, will matter much unless Americans stop trying to use the criminal-justice system as a tool for managing social ills. Across the country, in red states and blue states, reformist state and district attorneys have recently been elected on platforms of rolling back harsh sentencing, reducing the enforcement of marijuana laws, and knocking down crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.
And change is happening.
0コメント